713-662-3123
A for lease sign gets read once, by someone driving past at 40 miles an hour, who is not looking for you. That is the whole design brief. Everything else — the material, the size, the mounting — follows from it.
Houston Sign Company produces and installs commercial real estate signs for brokers, landlords and property managers from 5801 Chimney Rock Road, Houston, TX 77081. This is what we ask people before we quote a lease sign, and why.
Two Kinds of Lease Sign, and the Line Between Them
The word “lease sign” covers two products that are ordered in completely different ways.
Small corrugated plastic signs go on a wire stake in the grass, near the door or at the driveway. These are the ones you order online. Corrugated plastic, full color, single- or double-sided, in nine sizes from 12 x 9 inches up to 48 x 48 inches, with wire stakes available at checkout. You order a stack, you put them out, you replace them when they fade.
Post-and-panel signs are the tall ones set in the ground at the street line, carrying the brokerage logo and the phone number. Along with large property banners and installed signage, these are quoted per job rather than bought off a list, because the panel size, the number of posts and the site conditions all change the price. Panel material and post height are set at quote.
The practical split is distance. If the sign is meant to be read from a parking space, the small corrugated sign does the job. If it is meant to be read from a through road, it will not.
How Big the Letters Have to Be
This is the decision most lease signs get wrong, and it is the one with an actual answer. Letter height sets readable distance, and the relationship is close to linear.
Work backward from the road. A tenant rep driving a 45 mph feeder road covers about 500 feet in eight seconds. To give them that long with your panel, “FOR LEASE” needs to be close to 12 inches tall. Three-inch letters stop being readable at 100 feet, which is a walking distance, not a driving one.
The same chart applies to the broker’s phone number, and that is where most panels fall down. The words FOR LEASE are set large and the number is set small, so the sign is read and the call is not made.
What Belongs on the Panel
A lease panel is not a brochure. Four things, in this order of size:
- FOR LEASE, or FOR SALE OR LEASE if you are running both. One phrase, largest type on the sign.
- One phone number. If two brokers are on the listing, one number goes large and the second goes in the smaller block below. Two equally sized numbers split the reader’s attention at the exact moment you need it.
- The brokerage logo, at the top, where it identifies the sign without competing with the message.
- Available square footage or acreage, if the number qualifies the caller. “±14,000 SF” removes the wrong callers before they dial.
Leave the website URL small or leave it off. Nobody types a URL from a moving car. If the panel is going somewhere people stand still — a lobby window, a gate — that changes, and a window poster or a property banner may be the better format.
Color Does Half the Work
Contrast is what makes the panel legible at distance, not the size of the sign. Black letters on a yellow background reads farthest. White on black, black on white and yellow on black are the next strongest.
Most brokerages have a brand palette and will not move off it, which is fine — the point is to check the contrast of the combination you are already using before it is printed at four feet wide. If your brand colors sit close together in value, the fix is usually to reverse the type block rather than to change the brand.
Send us your artwork, or a brief for our graphic design team to work from.
Installation, Relocation, and Takedown
Post-and-panel signs are installed, not delivered. We handle installation as part of the job, and for commercial real estate work the average time from concept to completion is 3 to 10 business days, depending on what the install requires. Residential signage runs 2 to 7 business days.
If you are carrying more than a handful of listings, the harder problem is not putting signs up. It is getting them down, and tracking where they went. Our site sign management programs track placements, removals and relocations, so a panel that comes off a leased building gets logged rather than lost in the back of a truck.
For multi-tenant properties, the lease sign is usually one piece of a set. Property management signs cover the rest: “Now Leasing” signs, leasing office banners, directional signs, parking and towing signs, and ADA signage. Feather flags are what most managers use to flag a current special.
What We Need to Quote One
Pricing for post-and-panel lease signs is quoted per job. To put a number on yours, send us:
- The property address, and which road the sign faces.
- How far back from that road the sign will sit.
- Whether it is for lease, for sale, or both.
- The brokerage logo and the contact block exactly as it should read.
- Whether the panel is single- or double-sided.
- How many properties you expect to sign this year, if you want them produced as a set.
Permit requirements vary by jurisdiction and by whether the property sits inside Houston city limits. Tell us the address and we will flag anything that looks like it needs checking before production. Send us the details and we will come back with a price.
Order the Small Lease Signs Online
The corrugated plastic signs do not need a quote. They are on our store at fixed prices, and you can put artwork on them and check out the same way you would order anything else:
- Custom yard signs — nine sizes from 12 x 9 inches to 48 x 48 inches, single- or double-sided, wire stakes optional at checkout. This is the product for driveway and door-side lease signs, directional arrows to a leasing office, and open-space markers.
- Campaign signs — the same corrugated plastic build at a fixed bulk price, ordered for volume rather than variety. Landlords with many small units order these when every sign carries the same message.
Those two products are on the store because their specification is fixed. Post-and-panel signs, large property banners and installed signage are not, which is why they are quoted instead. If you are not sure which side of that line your property falls on, the deciding question is the one at the top of this page: how far away does it have to be read?
Full range and examples: Commercial Real Estate Signs and Houston Real Estate Signs.